West is best: Affective assemblages and Spanish oöcytes

Introduction

Whether or not we have a national soul? I really don’t know but I do think that people in Spain are so warm and friendly in a way that we are missing some of here at home and really are missing in Russia. (Interview with Rita, single woman in her early 50s, September 2010)

When, at the age of 46, Rita was legally too old to undergo fertility treatment in Denmark, ¹ she chose to go to Spain. The large availability of Spanish donors (framed by Rita as warm and friendly), recommendations from her Danish doctor, a liberal legal and regulatory framework permitting, in her case, both sperm and oöcyte donation, combined with her trust in a Western European hospital system, made her choose Spain. Because Spain has developed into a hotspot for trans-European oöcyte donation, this article seeks to understand how Danish women construct and naturalize going to Spain for treatment. Questions to be explored are: In what ways do affects such as desire and hope circulate to create particular understandings of trans-European oöcyte donation? How do these understandings draw upon idealized, racialized, and nationalized understandings of the imagined donor? In the article, I argue that westernness becomes synonymous with quality and whiteness, oöcyte donation gets renaturalized as a form of gifting, while oöcytes become understood as a shared global fluid. In what follows, core feminist methodological and theoretical considerations are first presented prior to analyses of the ways that desire, hope, gifting, and imagination flow to form particular affective assemblages on trans-European oöcyte donation.

Background

This study is based on a multi-sited approach (Marcus, 1999) and took place from fall 2010 to spring 2012. It involved interviews with 12 Danish women and couples going to Spain for treatment, two trips in January 2012 to a prominent fertility clinic in Barcelona, and additional interviews with international patients present at the clinic. Spanish fertility clinics are some of the most widely used and respected foreign clinics with which private Danish clinics collaborate and to which Danish women turn for oöcyte donation. The 12 interviewees ranged in age between 28 and 51 years although, at the time of the interview, most were in their early 40s. They were all heterosexual, white, and middle- or upper middle-class women. Ten of them were married or cohabiting, one was a single woman who had used both anonymous oöcyte and sperm donation, two were pregnant, while four already had a child from oöcyte donation – three of them were in fact pursuing a second trip to Spain for a donor sibling. All except one of the interviews took place in the interviewees’ homes.

Briefly, Spain has emerged as a hotspot for oöcyte donation due to a combination of liberal post-Franco legislation on family planning and reproductive technologies (Waldby, 2012), cheap (short and easy) flights, existing ties with Northern European clinics, a sufficient pool of egg donors that create short, if any, waiting lists and make traveling to Spain for egg donation doable. The production of Spain as a place for fertility treatment also derives its attractiveness from its reputation as a popular tourist destination. A number of clinics are scattered in tourist destinations along the Mediterranean coast, using existing infrastructures (hotels, airports, restaurants, etc.), reassuring the international clientele that they will be able to communicate in English (Waldby, 2012). Moreover, in the recruitment of younger women as oöcyte donors, Spain uses a compensation-based model (Waldby, 2012) – paying close to €1000 in cash for each donation with the effect that Spain currently has no shortage of oöcyte donors.

Feminist cultural analyses of oöcyte donation

Feminist scholars have already theorized globalized reproduction as political-economic configurations (e.g. Roberts and Scheper-Hughes, 2011; Waldby and Cooper, 2008), as performatives involving (in)fertile bodies that move in sync (e.g. Bharadwaj, 2008) as well as material-semiotic practices (e.g. Åsberg and Lykke, 2010). In this section, I briefly situate my research within transnational feminist accounts on globalized reproduction and I then turn to the theoretical and analytical concept of affective assemblage.

Transnational feminist scholars problematize the political-economic configurations of globalized reproduction. For Jyotsna A Gupta (2006: 32) globalized reproduction is discursively framed as a ‘supermarket of reproductive alternatives.’ Individuals are fragmented into disposable and potentially commodified parts while the western rhetoric of reproductive choice is reduced to a right to consume (e.g. Scheper-Hughes, 2005). Similarly, Lawrence Cohen (2005), in his application of the pharmacological concept ‘bioavailability’ notes that to be bioavailable is to be available for ‘selective disaggregation’ (2005: 83). While Cohen (2005) develops the term in regard to medical travel and organ trafficking in India, the concept is aptly applied to reproductive substances as well: the development of technological apparatuses (ultrasound technology, freezing and thawing technology, for example) combined with the availability of young, female bodies whose phenotypes are in demand.

Oöcyte donation demands attention to gendered, racialized, sexualized, and nationalized discourses (e.g. Franklin, 2001; Nahman, 2008). For example, Ben Campbell (2007) questions the presumed innocence involved in matching physical characteristics between gamete donors and recipients. Meanwhile Nahman (2006) positions the Preferred External Features form used in the Israeli clinic in which she conducted her ethnographic work as a technology of racism. Similarly, in the Spanish clinic in which my research was conducted, migrant white Brazilian egg donors are asked to outline three (not two as is the case for other donors) generations of ‘whiteness.’ As put by the fertility doctor in charge of the donor program in the Barcelona clinic: ‘Brazil has a history of blackness’ (interview January 2012). The donor’s ability to reproduce whiteness is questioned if she comes from a country known for its racial hybridity. Moreover, the assumption of a white northern clientele combined with Spanish legal requirements to match donors with recipients, encourages the Spanish clinics to recruit Eastern European immigrant women as oöcyte donors (Bergmann, 2011). Catherine Waldby (2012) has developed this critique further and concludes that Eastern European women, working as nannies and oöcyte donors, become ‘both well-educated care and fair-skinned biological capital’ (2012: 294) navigating the market for whiteness. Reproductive markets, then, draw our attention to the ways in which racial discourse is both entwined with and exceeds nationalistic discourses by figuring whiteness as a pan-European characteristic. They also reveal how stereotypes work – or what Michael Billig’s (1995) work on nationalism refers to as forms of ‘hot’ and ‘banal’ nationalism.

In this article, trans-European oöcyte donation is viewed as an affective assemblage. ² The assemblage concept functions best, George E Marcus and Erkan Saka (2006: 106) argue, when making reference to ‘the imaginaries for the shifting relations and emergent conditions of spatially distributed objects of study.’ Similarly, Aihwa Ong and Stephen Collier (2005), in their account on ‘global’ assemblages, argue that these define ‘new material, collective, and discursive relationships’ (2005: 4). The notion of an assemblage, then, speaks to complex, unstable, partial, and situated elements that come together to form something else.

While the concept of assemblage has been used to discuss the effects of globalization, in the work of Jasbir K Puar (2007) it is brought in dialogue with feminist intersectionality and queer studies, and reframed into an analytical and methodological concept. ³ Puar (2007) introduces the concept of ‘terrorist assemblages’ and argues that the ‘female terrorist,’ for example, is loaded with intersectional meanings, yet also something else – a ‘momentary, fleeting’ mess (2007: 220). In her work, assemblages come to illustrate forms of sexualized racism and racialized nationalism, generating particular moments of ‘homonationalism’ in which western nations work to construct themselves as progressive (read: superior) through the presence of the liberated homosexual. In the case of reproduction, global reproductive and affective assemblages underscore the circuit of discursive and materialist exchanges that take place when the making of (Nordic) families goes global. The affective assemblage in human oöcytes, for example, illustrates how these are dynamic substances imploded with varying and shifting values (Bharadwaj, 2008). Human oöcytes move from having little value (rhetorically framed as ‘excess’ or ‘waste’ material) to, in their encounter with other bodies, producing affects of immense value (‘intelligent’ eggs) or potential (my future baby). The concept of affective assemblage, then, works as an analytical resource to illustrate how matter, discourses, and affects shift and come together – privileging the event-likeness of fertility treatments. In line with Puar (2007), in this article affective assemblages will work to illustrate what these relations do when they come together.

The above theoretical and conceptual issues exemplify some of the traffic that takes place when reproduction goes global. In their analyses of globalization, Sarah Franklin, Celia Lury, and Jackie Stacey (2000) argue that global nature gets reinvented as global culture through the ‘western consumption of ancient “third-world” feminine body rituals’ (2000: 107). For Franklin et al. (2000), western women regain their lost nature in the consumption of (third world) women’s rituals, performatively constituting a shared universal femininity – or panfemininity, and in the process, dissolving differences through consumption (2000: 105). Moreover, oöcyte donation operates within the affective realm of desire and hope, producing particular understandings of traveling for eggs and drawing upon idealized notions of altruism and gifting. Affects circulate and create relationships, involving what Sara Ahmed (2004: 120) refers to as ‘sticky associations.’ In positioning globalized reproduction as a performative and advancing the notion of affective assemblages, I first turn to how desire, hope, and altruism mediate relations within the European reproductive landscape and how these mediations work to renaturalize relations between donors and recipients.

Affective assemblages: On reproductive gifts, desire, and hope

Hope and desire defend the mobility of infertile Northern European bodies and turn their travel into justified and necessary reproductive acts, while altruism and reproductive gifts mobilize feelings of unity and solidarity between women. ⁴ This is most notable in the promotional material directed towards oöcyte donors and available on the website of the Spanish fertility clinic IVI as well as in the clinic’s promotional flyers distributed throughout Barcelona. ⁵ In the photo two white female bellies (one is pregnant) and the lower part of their breasts are facing each other, speaking not only to proximity (as the breasts are almost touching) but also, to physical similarity (both bodies are white, same height, and size), framing oöcyte donation as an act of giving or as noted in the discourse on the photo: ‘To give life is to receive life.’ ⁶

The discursive and materialist exchanges, present in the marketing material and directed towards potential donors, work to create an affective assemblage of oöcyte donation as a particular type of exchange: It is a ‘giving’ or even a ‘sharing’ rather than a ‘selling.’ This is, also, a very particular donor body – white, young, and with a conventional feminine shape. The donor body is distinctly feminine emphasizing a curved body, yet also, raced as white and as always already matching the recipient body, thus, in the photo the desire for racial sameness is privileged. Receiving life (through oöcyte donation) is, in the photo, represented in the perfectly shaped pregnant belly, protected by the pregnant woman’s hands (carefully positioned on the belly) and juxtaposed to the similarly healthy looking donor body. Sameness (whiteness, westernness, size, and the proximity of the two bellies and the breasts) rather than difference (nationality, race, economic, or age differences) positions oöcytes, in this case, as global fluids readily shared between two physically similar and perhaps even like-minded women.

When oöcyte donation is framed in light of a discourse of giving and receiving life, it is also made to appear similar to other forms of vital donations such as blood or even organ donation. It renaturalizes and disavows that particular women (younger, poorer, and Southern European or immigrant women) act as gift givers or reproductive assistants in this transnational economy. Indeed, it draws on the notion of fertility as shared among women, illustrating the workings of a reproductive panfemininity of sorts. Moreover, the notion of a Spanish ‘giving’ culture exemplified in the use of the word ‘donation’ does something: It mimics the ideal maternal body – a giving, other-oriented body; simultaneously distancing the sharing of reproductive matter from the world of commerce, situating it, instead, with other types of bodily exchanges (such as blood donation) and discourses such as notions of a larger Spanish culture of voluntarism.

This affective assemblage of giving is also present in the communication that takes place between patients and fertility doctors. In the Spanish clinic, oöcyte donation is contextualized in light of a ‘general’ Spanish willingness to donate ‘excess’ matter such as blood or even organs. This is a narrative recounted by patients as well and one in which the oöcyte donor becomes the ideal stranger: She is anonymous and with no biological rights to the offspring, yet nevertheless, understood within a cultural repertoire of a ‘good woman’ (Pollock, 2003) as well as within a grand cultural repertoire of an ‘innate’ giving people:

And that’s kinda where it comes back to Spain because I feel like in Spain we feel comfortable with … I don’t feel like anyone is being forced into doing something they don’t want to do. It was interesting the doctor said that Spain has the highest rate in the world of donors … of organ donors, so it is part of their culture to be giving. So it puts your mind at rest. I suppose it may sound awful but the further East you go, concerns would creep in as to these women who are donating. Are they purely doing it as a generous thing or is there something more? (Interview with Mike and Ruby, married couple in their early 40s, January 2012)

The Spanish clinics have successfully disassociated themselves from the current Spanish economic recession including young women’s limited employment opportunities. In the above statement, Mike and Ruby mobilize a narrative in which they position oöcyte donation in Spain as emerging from and demonstrative of a culture predicated on altruism. In this narrative, fertility treatments in Spain become more trustworthy and even superior, while also casting doubt on the ethics associated with oöcyte donation in other parts of the reproductive landscape (such as in Eastern Europe). In the face of the current international news reports on young Spanish women donating their eggs to pay their bills, ⁷ the medical staff, clinical coordinators as well as infertile couples travelling to Spain may be more invested than ever to invigorate and renaturalize the narrative of Spanish altruism, reframing cash paid up front (Waldby, 2012) to an innate ‘culture of giving’ and, thus, making Spain a comfortable and even ethical destination of choice.

The directionality with which reproductive altruism flows works to create an affective assemblage in which younger and less economically advantaged women in Spain act as (natural) gift givers. As noted by Nikolas Rose (2007), emotions and desire are intimately related to the economies of hope and imagination. In this case, these emotions are also related to the construction of particular affective assemblages: Hope as expressed by the recipients circulates through the imagination of pregnancy, parenthood, and a child but also, in the choice of picking a particular country and clinic, imagining commonalities alongside history, culture, religion, morality, or even biology. Desire and hope are mobilized in close proximity to narratives of happy, fertile, gift-giving donors as well as successful exchanges between women who, in these narratives, as well as in the IVI oöcyte donor campaign, are framed as sharing not only reproductive substances but also a universal desire for motherhood.

A ‘Mediterranean’ mixture

In the Spanish clinics, human oöcytes are on face value void of nationality, race, and personality, yet they are given new meanings in the stories told by the recipients. As noted by Nahman (2006: 210), the geography of desirability must not be forgotten. Following Lock and Nguyen (2010), I note that organs or oöcytes acquire a biography of their own, or as pinpointed by Berglund and Lundin (2012), in their work on transnational organ transfers, recipients spend a lot of time pondering upon the characteristics of the organ provider. ⁸ While the Spanish doctors as well as the international coordinators downplay background information on the donor and instead, point to the importance of shared phenotypes; in this affective assemblage, notions of sameness, in particular along matters of whiteness, hair, and eye colour, are privileged:

It’s a little like … it really does not matter but at the same time I thought you may just as well. They sit and simply ask and look at me: Do you have light skin, do you have dark skin? So I say no … I can get very tanned but we must say light skin or else it becomes kind of … Then, we move to hair colour and so because I sometimes have more red hair and things like that but I am really dark brown so it is dark brown, right. And eye colour is obviously blue but my boyfriend has green and evidently, there is a lot of green eyes down there so I said blue eyes as number one, green eyes as number two, and otherwise it is totally not important, then, we take the brown ones (laughs). (Interview with Jane, woman in her mid-40s with a cohabiting partner, October 2011)

In finding a match Jane, like several of the other interviewees, is keen to stress her ‘natural’ colours. For example, Jane tans, yet she has distinctly light skin, she says, reiterating a racialized desire for whiteness. Although she sometimes has red hair, she is, she reports, a ‘natural’ dark brown. The decision to request or mimic the recipient’s ‘natural’ appearance is also present in the decision of what photo to send to the clinic. Kali, for example, recounts her decision: ‘We shot it face-on. I had chosen to not do the eyeliner so that it could be as natural as possible (laughs). I wanted them to get the nuances in colours’ (interview with Kali, married and in her late 20s). The Danish travelers privilege a ‘natural’ look, frequently also sending photos of the entire family including any older siblings. In the Extended Profile List used by the Spanish clinics, the Northern European woman is in this manner invited to become a consumer, reproducing a desire for sameness and actively participating in the market in whiteness.

In going to Spain, the Danish travelers also stress the origin of the ova. The choice of country and clinic is a highly emotional choice and for some of the interviewees, it enables a particular procreation story to be told. Line – a married woman in her mid-30s — for example, wants only to use fresh oöcytes, as fresh (not frozen ova) make her feel reassured that these biogenetic substances are indeed ‘Spanish.’ While this in part is due to her concern over a potential trade in Eastern European oöcytes, Spanish oöcytes are also desirable because they grant her an opportunity to tell a particular, and to her desirable, procreation story. This is a story that includes the future child’s ancestral roots: ‘Genetically, you are Spanish,’ she imagines telling the child (interview with Line).

The origin of the ova is important for other reasons as well. In the narratives, Spanish ova and Western European ‘quality’ stick together. This is in sharp contrast to ‘Eastern European’ ova and potentially in conflict with what Monica Konrad (2005) terms informational relatedness – physical similarities based on hair, skin, and eye colour. It speaks, however, to a particular understanding of western cultures embedded in the geographical imaginaries inscribed in and by colonial discourse and history. In the narratives, Spain comes to be understood as a ‘civilized’ culture:

I could suddenly see a lot [of people] who reminded me of myself in terms of complexion. I had not thought that much about it but if it had been Riga or one of those places, then it would not be such a good fit. I also think that Spain is a bit more civilized, more European (laughs). (Interview with Jane, with a cohabiting partner and in her mid-40s, October 2011)

In Jane’s narrative resemblance is twofold: A desire for whiteness but importantly, also, shared cultures. In positioning Spain as more European than Latvia, the interviewees work to draw the borders around a renaturalized Europe as consisting of those states at its Western edge (running North to South), excluding its ‘Eastern’ edges. It is the former Europe that constitutes the European and the civilized and which gets constructed at the center of European culture, history, and values. In this affective assemblage, the materialist exchange of bodily fluids, then, comes to signify a cultural exchange between similarly minded civilized nations with populations made up of the same/similar ‘racial’ stock.

The choice to travel to Spain privileges ‘quality’ treatments and ‘quality’ eggs in the production of Northern European white babies. Stereotyped and quite banal sentiments of East and West pop up in other interviews as well. Thea frames Eastern Europe, and Russia in particular, as ‘primitive’; Rita notes that Eastern European clinics are ‘untrustworthy,’ while other interviewees conclude that these clinics lack the technological expertise of the more modern Spanish clinics. The fact that Spain is a more expensive choice makes it de facto a ‘better’ choice. Moreover, in the tales of altruism, Spanish donors are constructed in close proximity to ‘family’ values embedded in the imaginary of a Catholic country and Catholic donors. Whereas Spanish donors have agency in donating their reproductive matter within the construction and naturalization of an innate culture of voluntarism and altruism, Eastern European donors’ reproductive agency is at the outset framed as doubtful, bordering instead on mediated accounts of mail order brides and sex trafficking.

The Mediterranean mixture or affective assemblage, present in these narratives, is both exoticized and contained. Exotic in large part due to the assumed temperament and way of life, or as noted by John and Kali: ‘You can’t help but also think of the zest for life. I mean South of the Alps and the sun down there compared to Helsinki or wherever it is. It is cold and they are pale’ (interview with John and Kali, a married couple; Kali is in her late 20s and John in his mid-30s). The fact that John and Kali view Spain as a ‘good choice’ is related to their preconceived notion of a particular outlook on life creating an affective assemblage in which a warmer climate and tanned skin colour (the interviewer cannot help but note, however, that John’s complexion is very pale as well) go together to produce lovable and desirable babies. The assumption of Spanish culture as outgoing (read: more loving of life) becomes a stand-in for the eggs as well:

But I do like their way of being. It is hard to explain but I have liked the times that I have been in Spain. I think that they are nice people. Most of them seem very healthy and reasonable and when we were down there, it sure seemed like they were all exercising. You do notice that as well. On the beach they are walking and there are many who are running, and they carry all that exercise stuff with them down to the beach. I think they are concerned about their general wellbeing and want to be 120 years old. They have good food. They also have a great sense about their clothing style and stuff like that. (Interview with Thea and Lars, married couple in their early 40s, April 2012)

In Thea’s account, the beach goers (whether walking or running) come to represent a more general Spanish perspective on health. Outdoor lifestyle, good food as well as fashion-conscious bodies speak to the desirability of this Mediterranean mix. Interestingly, this is in no way how Thea self-identifies. She plays a musical instrument, is not particularly concerned with physical exercise, she says, or even fashion. Yet, she privileges these characteristics in the imagined donor and naturalizes them by putting them in close proximity with other discourses on health and consumption. In her account, difference is consumed as style – or seasoning (hooks, 1992). As bell hooks (1992) argues, difference assists in making the ordinary a bit more exotic. Thea’s identity as a mother-to-be is reconstituted in this intimate relationship with a stranger’s eggs – encouraging her also, as she is now pregnant with twins, to do everything she can to make the babies ‘hers’ (interview with Thea).

Meanwhile, other interviewees stress the imagined donor’s educational and intellectual abilities as well as shared interests. For example, Kali and John have been assigned an anonymous donor at their chosen Spanish clinic. They already know that the donor is the same age as Kali (28 years of age). Unlike Kali, she is blonde (John is blonde, however) but her BMI is, they both make a point of noting, like Kali’s – constituting a shared biology of sorts. Moreover, the fact that the clinic has informed them that the donor is a gymnastics teacher enables John and Kali to see a particular, to them, important form of sameness:

To Kali, Spain is a more exotic choice (in comparison to Finland). Having Spanish roots (and rhythm) creates a desirable procreation story (again, unlike having Finnish roots). In this affective assemblage, dance exemplifies the exotic, while it also comes to transcend and shrink cultural differences (now grouped into the category of foreign dance) and differences between women (in this case between Kali and the donor). Kali successfully conflates and shrinks ‘the Spanish’ and ‘gymnastics’ with other types of ‘exotic’/foreign dance (such as samba). And this is in spite of the fact that flamenco – not samba is a more traditional Spanish dance.

These affective assemblages clearly position an imagined friendly, outgoing, and temperamental Spanish culture as desirable, yet the exoticness of Spain is contained in numerous ways as well. Jane, for instance, repeatedly mentions the importance of donor education and similarly, Rita recounts stressing the oöcyte donor’s intellectual abilities in her dialogue with the medical doctor at the Barcelona clinic. The recipients talk of the imagined Spanish donor as more similar to them than different. For example, Jane goes to great lengths to discuss the importance of attractiveness and expresses great fears that the donor is ‘really, really ugly’ (interview with Jane). Yet, she is calmed by the fact that she was often, as a younger woman, wrongly taken to be Spanish. While exoticness is reduced to temperament, bodily movements, and zest for life, a desire for normalcy such as intellectual abilities or even a certain level of attractiveness is strongly present as well.

Assemblages of shared genes, history, and culture

If we view oöcyte implantation as a collective happening, then how are affects managed and directed to produce particular procreation stories? Feminist scholars have already pinpointed how reproductive technologies deconstruct yet simultaneously reconstruct our understanding of kinship and relatedness. Monica Konrad (2005) introduces the concepts ‘informational relatedness’ and ‘relational non-relation,’ for example. Informational relatedness refers to the use of phenotype matching in oöcyte donation – a task that requires the clinician to ‘draw together visually, in the mind’s eye what future offspring would look like when all parties to the conception are blended into one entity as the mix of a viable “match” ’ (Konrad, 2005: 142). The relational non-relation reconfigures the making of kinship in cases of oöcyte donation into an active mediation or energy expenditure. In this affective assemblage, donor anonymity has the effect of disenabling motherhood; while shared blood, space, and intent enable the becoming-a-mother affective. Thus, desire, not genes (the donated oöcytes), becomes the marker of relatedness (Thompson, 2011).

In the interviews, reproductive and affective labor work to renaturalize oöcyte donation – in fact, making trans-European oöcyte donation appear natural (Franklin et al., 2000). ⁹ It even works to set oöcyte donation apart from sperm donation. For example, Nete reconfigures oöcyte donation into the Roman principle mater semper certa est – the mother is always known – a principle reinforced by the fact that Danish law assigns motherhood to the woman who gives birth and Danish citizenship to the child born by a Danish woman. In the narrative, Nete and Will’s relational non-relation with the donor is reduced to ‘spare parts’ – necessary, yet as noted earlier by her, during the oöcyte implantation procedure, also, ‘tiny’ reproductive cells. Importantly, this reconfiguation has the effect of establishing ownership to either the one that purchases and puts the parts together (the clinic) or the recipient woman (or couple) who requested the parts in the first place.

The Danish recipients negotiate going to Spain by formulating (new) forms of relatedness – not with the Spanish donor who remains a ‘stranger’ but most notably, with a more generic Spain. For example, Ruby and Mike position the Irish as having a shared history and religion with the Spanish. Similarly, Line notes ‘my other country has for some reason always been Spain. It is the first country that I vacationed in’ (interview with Line, a married woman in her mid-30s). Because Line spent time with her now diseased mother vacationing in Spain, returning to Spain enables her to continue an already existing family history. Similarly, Mike speaks of growing up with Spanish exchange students present in their family home in Ireland. Relatedness with Spain and Spanish people circulate to make oöcyte donation in Spain seem like a ‘natural’ choice. Meanwhile, the potential intimacy involved in the use of donor eggs is resolved by framing eggs as ‘spare parts’ or treatments – separated and distanced from the ‘real’ bodies from which they are derived and formed in these narratives into new collective bodies. In these affective assemblages, the donor’s reproductive work goes unnoticed while privileges associated with reproductive mobility that enable Danish couples to go to Spain in the first place largely become invisible.

Relatedness is constructed by reproducing a sense of shared Western European culture. It includes preconceived ideas on female empowerment framed as unique to the West. To this extent, narratives of similarity and difference circulate in the interviews: Narratives of similarity to a Western (Spanish) way of life and narratives of difference to a poorer and less developed Eastern European context. The interviewees see the young Spanish women that they meet in the clinic as stand-ins for the imagined donor. This younger ‘Spanish’ woman looks ‘empowered’ (interview with Rita, single in her early 50s) as well as ‘happy’ (interview with Line, married in her mid-30s). Line recounts her first visit to the Alicante clinic and the smile of a young Spanish woman present in the waiting room. To Line, the smile signified empowerment and an innate Spanish willingness to help (interview with Line). Borrowing from Hochschild (1983), smiling can be seen as a form of emotional labor, and thus, the imaginary oöcyte donor performs donation in a particular way producing ‘the proper state of mind in others’ (1983: 7), reiterating in this account the image of reproductive altruism.

Even the donor child, in these narratives of oöcyte donation in Spain, is positioned as more attractive and potentially, also, more lovable. In this affective assemblage, the future child is outgoing, easy, and charming, drawing upon conventional notions of Spanish culture:

I also feel like for instance with Russia … Then, I would prefer a Spanish child … mentally … I mean their mentality and it is funny because she [her 6-month-old daughter] is just like that. Whether it is me or the way we live or … She is happy and outgoing and easy and charming and loves other people (kissing sounds). My brother has been married to a Russian, which was really quite the experience, I must say. (Interview with Rita, September 2010)

The image of the lovable, cute, and happy child is a seductive one and a core element of the Spanish allure. On the website of the Spanish clinic Irema, for example, a fair-skinned and smiling baby looks directly at the photographer – in this staging most likely to be the prospective mother. ¹⁰ The baby yells out ‘ma, ma, ma’ (from a choice of eight different languages). The photo reproduces a global esthetics of the attractive child. This is a fair-skinned, healthy, seemingly happy, and easy baby. The Irema baby could be Spanish but it could also be an iconic or stereotypic Nordic, German or British baby. This performance privileges racialized understandings of nationality. While Spanish donors are assumed to be white, so are the Nordic, German or British recipients, and thus, in the clinical discourses, nationality becomes a stand-in for race. Meanwhile, the clinic challenges the infertile woman and her notion of reproductive agency in the words: ‘What are you waiting for?’ In this narrative of becoming-a-mother, the infertile woman is repositioned as a reproductive agent and the clinic in its rhetoric produces affects of agency, love, and desire. In so doing, Irema discursively draws on fertility as an enterprise culture, reproducing a well-known western feminist rhetoric of choice while also drawing upon the new political economy of hope (Rose and Novas, 2005). In the process, the ability to mix and match from a global culture of hybridity becomes ‘second nature’ (Franklin et al., 2000).

Conclusion: Fantasy eggs and European imaginations

In this article I have argued that trans-European oöcyte donation can be understood as affective assemblages. Desire, hope, and imaginations circulate when Danish women travel to Spain. In the narratives, westernness becomes a stand-in for racialized understandings including constructions of empowered, white oöcyte donors. The interviewees construct an imagined Western European shared femininity or hybridity of sorts. This type of hybridity is not new, however. From the peasant wet-nurses in 18th-century France who were hired to feed wealthier, yet sometimes also French working urban mothers’ children (Sussman, 1982) to Italian menopausal nuns whose urine in the 1970s contributed to the development of fertility drugs and the success story of the drug company Serono. Trans-European oöcyte donation follows in the tradition of injecting and mixing differently situated women’s reproductive and bodily fluids.

The narratives illustrate the affective work needed to form particular relations, including imaginary boundaries between East and West. In this juxtaposition, Spain is better and, to the travelers who can afford it, a more ethical choice. Quite conventional stereotypes of Eastern and Western Europe are circulated and produce particular affects of desire and hope. Consequently, I agree with Ahmed (2000) that the global flow of images or objects does not necessarily create new imaginaries. Quite to the contrary and as noted by her: ‘The flow of cultural images and objects across national boundaries means that difference as the basis of imaginary divides (“us” and “them”) is increasingly available to the western consumer’ (2000: 116). While difference in the Spanish context is made to appear exotic and available for consumption, it is also strategically minimized and reconfigured into quality treatments. Spanish clinics are framed as embedding sameness with Northern European women through shared whiteness, culture, and history. Difference, when it comes to Eastern Europe, is made to appear partly cultural, or even as suggested by Rita in the introductory quote, biological.

The affective assemblage of this Mediterranean mix draws on conventional stereotypes and produces particular affects. It involves homogeneous understandings of the availability of better quality, ‘white’ Spanish donor oöcytes, while it also injects hope and potentially new life into the recipients. Needless to say, the oöcyte donor is always imagined. Spanish donor oöcytes are ‘foreign’ and ‘stranger’ eggs but they are also, as they come in contact with recipient bodies, ‘familar’ and ‘attractive.’ Danish women position Spanish women as more like themselves than unlike – trustworthy and empowered, western, white, and civilized. Stereotypes of character and temperament are told to mobilize a tale of exotic likeness, constructing a desirable procreation story as well as new collective bodies – loveable, northern, and white European children. Difference is made to appear as style or temperament illustrating the doing that goes into renaturalizing fertilty travel and trans-European oöcyte donation. These narratives reconfigure motherhood as always already belonging to the woman who gives birth or, as noted by Janet Dolgin (1995), desire and intent sidestep biological, or even in this case, genetic ties. Intent along with affective and reproductive labor (desire, pregnancy, and birth-giving) – not genes or the reproductive labor that goes into the production of oöcytes – become the markers of maternity and the making of Northern European children.